


Tuesdays

by zarabithia



Category: DCU (Comics), Teen Titans (Comics)
Genre: Alzheimer's Disease, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-01-29
Updated: 2006-01-29
Packaged: 2018-11-19 09:31:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,827
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11310579
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zarabithia/pseuds/zarabithia
Summary: On Tuesdays, Lian Harper keeps her promises.





	Tuesdays

**Author's Note:**

> Written around the time of Nightwing v.1 #114. Lian's bitterness is a refection of Dick's characterization at the time.

Lian hates Tuesdays.

To most people in her profession, Tuesdays are a day to look forward to, much like normal people look forward to Fridays or Saturdays.  Weekends are the busiest days for her, of course.  Whole months go by without a single weekend of sleep, and Lian wonders lately how much longer her aging body is going to allow her that luxury.   Mondays are usually pretty busy from the weekend layover.  By Wednesday the creeps of the world start to get restless and by Thursday, the criminals are gnawing at the teeth to get started on the weekend.  

But most of the time, Tuesdays are calm. 

Which is why every Tuesday find her here in the seaweed colored chair next to Dick Grayson’s bed in room 402 of Hollow Harbor Glen.  It’s the only day of the week she has time.  There’s not a shred of coincidence in the fact that Tuesdays are also the days she visits the graveyard across the Harbor- where her grandfather, uncle, aunt, and father are buried.

Lian doesn’t mind visiting the graveyard as much.  She misses her family, but it’s peaceful there, and she knows each of them laid down their lives fighting the good fight.  That knowledge brings her great comfort, and it’s a sense she carries into battle with her every time she picks up an arrow.

There’s no comfort in this place. . . or this man.

Lian does take a little bit of pleasure in the name, though.  The place is named after the road it’s on, but the idea that Dick Grayson should end up in a place called Hollow Harbor Glen is poetic justice in Lian’s eyes.  He had abandoned everyone who had ever cared about him and what did he have to show for it?  Nothing but a cold, white room filled with bedpans, heart monitors, and a colostomy bag.  

Lian found it entirely appropriate and nothing short of what he deserved.  A man who had scorned human companionship for forty years didn’t deserve company.  She wouldn’t be here at all, if she hadn’t made a promise to her father twenty years ago to keep an eye out on “Uncle” Dick.  She’s kept her word, never minding the fact that he hasn’t been her “uncle” she was eight years old.

Which is why, every Tuesday at 4:00, Lian finds her way to Hollow Harbor Glen where she sits down in the ugly green chair that feels like it is made of fiberglass, to wait for 4:30 to arrive.  She endures the stench of urine and overly cheerful staff that mistake her for a daughter.  She bites down the bile at the suggestion and tries very hard not to imagine what her father might think if he could hear that.  

Lian doesn’t say much during her thirty minute promise fulfillment sessions.  Usually, neither does Dick.  The physical effects of the Alzheimer’s have kicked in rather severely and he spends most of his time in a dreamlike state that make him completely unaware of his surroundings.  He still has the occasional bouts of lucidity during which the confusion makes him extremely combative, but most of the time, the visits are thirty minutes of uninterrupted watch glancing for Lian.  She doesn’t mind, of course. It’s not as if they had any type of lengthy verbal repertoire before he’d gotten sick.  His disease simply amplified a lack Lian had already known.  

But tonight he is . . . chatty.  It is unsettling, and Lian finds herself noticing the foul air much more sharply than before.  Whereas on most occasions, Dick barely acknowledges her presence, today he keeps calling  her “Cassie,” and regaling her with tales so old that the disease hasn’t managed to steal them from him yet.    

Lian doesn’t know who “Cassie” is, or more probably, was, but she listens attentively tonight in the way that she never has.  Firstly, because she has to make sure that the tales are fractured enough that the knowledge within them isn’t damaging.  She decides they aren’t harmful at all, since most of the people involved in his mumblings are long since dead.

The second reason is more complicated and also makes part of Lian want to jump up and run out of the room, because all Dick has talked about for the past ten minutes are the Teen Titans.  His Teen Titans, not the Superboy and Robin version, and not the Warhawk and Wonder Twins version that came later.  

Lian remembers her red and orange room at the Tower, cluttered with plush dolphins, plastic bows, and blocks with Tamarian and English symbols.  She remembers games of tag with Wally, play station with Cyborg, and hide and seek with Raven . She remembers every Titan that ever roamed the halls of the Tower and how safe they made her feel, even while growing up in the very center of chaos.

And for some reason, tonight Dick is remembering too.  It only makes Lian hate Tuesdays more and more with each passing moment.

“Cassie, are you alright?  You don’t look well.”

“I’m not Cassie,” she snaps.  He looks so pained at her tone of voice that she actually feels guilty.  After all, many things may be this man’s fault, but his memory loss isn’t one of them.  She lowers her voice when she speaks to him again.  “It’s Lian.  Lian Harper.”

Her laughs. The sound is raspier and weaker than it was before, but it still brings forth promises of protection and love - promises that had gone unfulfilled by dear old “Uncle” Nightwing.  “You’re too old to be Lian Harper,” he admonishes.  “She’s just a little girl.”  

His speech patterns have dwindled of late, and a tiny deposit of drool has collected in the folds of his chin.  Lian reaches for a tissue from the night stand and wipes it away - because she made a promise.

“Lian belongs to Roy,” he murmurs, as if reading her mind, which she is pretty certain was never a power Nightwing ever possessed.  If he had, it makes his actions all the more cruel.  “Roy. . .” The rest of Dick’s thought is lost as he trails off back into his own dreamland.  From the look on his face, the memory or thought is a happy one, and Lian is appropriately bitter about that fact.

Since the last fight they’d had, her father had never had a happy memory concerning Dick Grayson.  Sure, her father hadn’t spent the rest of his life in mourning - he’d moved on, eventually finding lasting happiness with Terry, but the lingering shadow of Nightwing had always been present in their lives.  Because at the end of the day, Nightwing had abandoned her father.  He’d also abandoned her, but Lian wasn’t petty enough to care about that.  

She is petty enough to be angry that this disease has left Dick with the happy memories he had taken away from her father.

She glances at her watch.  Five more minutes.  

“Cass. . . did I ever tell you about our first kiss?”

“No.”  Lian doesn’t want to know. Why is he still talking?  The nurses said he wouldn’t get better.

“In the Batmob. . . no, the Arrowcar,” he says somewhat uncertainly.  Lian is glad for his uncertainty because it makes that damn happy smirk briefly leave his face.  “Ah, yes. The Arrowcar.  We were waiting for. . . the others. . . and it was just us. . . in the back seat.  We hadn’t even formed the Titans yet. Just us.”

Lian supposes “the others” are Batman and Green Arrow.  Four more minutes.

“We didn’t know. . .what we were doing.  The others caught us right in the middle. . . of our second kiss.”  He laughs again, and Lian wonders what kind of drugs they are giving him.  Having Batman catch you in the middle of your first kiss can’t be funny.  It had to be terrifying as hell, and enough to scare one off dating forever.  

But then again, Dick liked Batman.  Dick liked Batman so much that he wanted to become just like him and had strove to do so, right down to the pushing everyone away so he could be completely alone part.  She supposes there’s something to be said for attaining your goals.

“They thought it . . . just hormones.  But it wasn’t.  Speedy . . .”  Dick trails off again and Lian casually takes time to wipe another drool deposit from his chin.  Vaguely, she wonders how the staff can keep up with his drool, and how often it dries there without attention.  Three more minutes.  

“Speedy and I. . . the bathroom. . . heroin,” he says, which doesn’t make any sense.  She knows Dick’s never done any drugs. Then again, he could just be trying to boil her father’s entire legacy down to that one mistake, which would be completely like Dick Grayson to do.  The “Junkie” label was one of the last parting shots Dick had thrown before leaving them.

“Speedy was so sick. . . held me tight. . . wanted me to make it stop.  I couldn’t stop it.”  The happy look vanishes, and this time Lian isn’t quite as glad.  He looks pained, and she’d feel bad for him, if she didn’t know that feeling pain was a hell of a lot better than training yourself to feel nothing at all.

But the pain vanishes as quickly as it came, and the disease is once again his friend as the smile came back across his face.  “Roy. . . always there for me.  He is . . . even when there’s no one else . . . Mom thinks he needs work on the trapeze.”

Mom? Lian knows that her father never met Dick’s parents.  The lucidity is starting to go, and Lian is glad.  She doesn’t want this man to talk about her father happily. He doesn’t have the right.  One more minute.

“My Roy,” he murmurs possessively.  “Thick and thin.  Titans . . . alone. . . Outsiders.”

Lian remembers the Outsiders as well as she remembers the Titans, but they aren’t good memories, so she doesn’t dwell on them.  Right on cue, a cold breeze makes its’ presence known and Lian can feel the tingle it causes through the brand, even underneath the tattoo.  Part of her blames Dick for the brand too, because if he hadn’t been obsessed with tracking Deathstroke, he could have protected her.  He was supposed to protect her. He was her Uncle Nightwing.

It’s 4:31 and she can go.  But the man never talks and now that he is speaking, she feels badly about leaving in mid conversation. So she stays and she listens.

She listens to tattered fragments of sentences about a mother, a father, a Batman, an Alfred, a Jason, and a Tim.  Sometimes they fight crime together, sometimes they live with the lions and tigers under a circus tent.  She listens, she wipes away the drool, and she remembers with him.  She remembers  the stolen kisses between her father and Dick when they thought no one was looking.  She remembers knowing that Uncle Nightwing’s bedroom was just down the hall but also knowing that if she wanted him, he’d be in her father’s room.  She remembers hearing the mixture of her father’s deep laughs and Uncle Nightwing’s soft chuckles through the walls at night.  Mostly she remembers Saturday morning cartoons with Cocoa Puffs spent sprawled between her father and Uncle Nightwing on the Titan couch.   

“ Found Lian together. . . Me and Roy.”       
     
Lian knows that story well. Before he had left them, Nightwing and her father had told that story to her many times.  Now that she was older, she suspected many parts had been edited out for content reasons, but at the time she had loved that story. She had loved the picture of Uncle Nightwing swooping down like her own private knight and handing her over to her father.  

He’d left them to be everyone else’s knight.  

“Lian and Speedy.  My family.”  

“Then why did you leave them?” She asks before she realizes she really shouldn’t. The nurses have told her that trying to have a coherent conversation isn’t wise. But, hell, they also told her that he wouldn’t have such long bouts of coherency, and they were clearly wrong about that.

Dick’s happy expression wavers again.  “No.  Never.”

“No, never,” she mutters softly. “Except the one time you did.”

“No. . . Cassie, get Roy.”  

That hurts.  It hurts because it’s taken him forty years to finally return her father’s want, and it’s far too late to do anyone any good.   It also hurts because she may have lost the man two decades ago, but sometimes Lian desperately does want to be able to drive to 305 Morocco Drive and get her father.  But. . .

“Cassie, GET ROY!”  It’s an insistent command, and despite the vocal mangles the disease causes, the tone of voice is one she recognizes well from the number of fights Dick and her father had hashed out in the living room just before he’d left them.   But this time, she doesn’t begrudge him the anger or the frustration, because she understands it so very well.

“I can’t,” she answers simply.    
      
“Why?”  There’s absolutely no happiness on his face now. He looks like he might cry, and she can’t ever remember seeing him that weak before.  “I need Roy.  Please.”

I need Roy.  Her father. . . had probably never known that, which makes Dick Grayson a bastard of the first order.  It’s for that reason, and because Lian knows that he will know the comfort that forgetting brings that she answers, “Roy is dead.”

“NO. . . No.  Don’t want to be alone. . . don’t want to be Batman.”  

Well, what’s there to say to that?  Other than you sure had us all fooled?  

There are tears now, and Christ, she didn’t mean to make the man cry.  She watches him for a minute, unsure what to do.  But she remembers the look on his face the day of her father’s funeral, and she remembers the angry words she had thrown his way.  She also remembers, quite clearly, the way he hadn’t said anything at all in response and had simply turned and walked away.  The look on his face that day was identical to the one he was wearing now, except without the tears.  

Lian feels badly about not having noticed it, twenty years ago.  

“Roy. . . gone.  Donna. Lilith.  Joey.  Couldn’t stop it.  But his throat . . . cut . . . the Riddler - no, Deathstroke - no. . .”  Frustration is beginning to overwhelm him.  “I can’t remember. Why can’t I remember?  It’s important!”  

The muscles are weak, but Dick still manages to use them still admirably well to struggle in his bed.  So she holds him still.  Despite her animosity towards the man, she still manages to ache at the ease with which he loses his confrontation.  He fights her only for the briefest of seconds before his struggles become a clinging hug.  “I’m scared,” he murmurs into her hair.  “Roy. Donna. Lilith. Joey.  Raven.  All gone.  My family always gone.  Don’t want to be Batman.  Don’t want to push. . .away.  But they. . . all gone.  So scared.”

The fragile body clinging tightly to her for dear life is a stark contrast to the strong arms that had tossed her up in the air, had cuddled her tightly, and had kicked bad guy ass. She remembers him at his prime well, and no one deserves. . . what he’s been reduced to.

When his grasp loosens, and his tiny frame stops shaking with sobs, Lian pulls free.

She notices the time on her watch says 5:00. She has Tower Duty in an hour and she still has to drive across the harbor to the graveyard.  Today is Tuesday, after all.  But before she leaves, she pulls the blanket around his frame more tightly and wipes the drool away from his chin one last time.  By the time she’s finished, the disease has wiped away the last vestiges of pain from his face and Lian is relieved.  

“I have to go,” she says softly, knowing that he probably won’t even remember she was here in an hour’s time.

He doesn’t respond. Lian takes a moment to feel sympathy for a man who so desperately didn’t want to end up alone but succumbed to the curse of the Bat anyway.  She’s still angry . . . because the pain that both he and her father had felt could have easily been avoided, if Dick simply hadn’t been so stupid.  But he had loved them - it hadn’t just been a figment of an overactive childhood imagination and that knowledge Lian will cling to as tightly as Uncle Nightwing had clung to her when he’d allowed her on the trapeze back at Titan’s Tower.

“Goodbye, Uncle Dick,” she says softly and turns to leave.

“Lian?”  

“Yeah?”

“Tell your father . . . to quit playing around in Star City. . . and hurry back to the Tower.  We miss him.”  

“I will.”

“Promise?”

“I promise.”  

Later, when she’s kneeling at a grave across the harbor, Lian keeps her word.  It is a Tuesday, after all, and Tuesdays are made for keeping promises.   



End file.
